Edvard Munch, Mass Media and Photography

There are a substantial number of blog entries that deal with painting: from the Renaissance painting to contemporary abstraction. This may seem odd to the casual viewer of a blog that is called Digital Imaging and Photography. Many of these entries are here due to the painter’s use of photographic and sometimes digital technologies or it is about the abstract nature of its piece and its influence on abstract film and digital art. Others are there simply because they deal with concepts or are part of a broader cultural movement like Romanticism or Modernism.

 

Detail from Edvard Munch's Self-Portrait "A la Marat" at Dr Jacobson's Clinic in Copenhagen (1908-1909)

The inclusion of Munch here has been prompted by the exhibition Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye that runs at the Tate Modern until 14 October, 2012. Edvard Munch can be seen as the heir to Van Gogh and his paintings of self-expression, the last breadths of Northern Romanticism. Van Gogh was famously described as “the hinge in which nineteenth-century Romanticism finally swung into twentieth-century Expressionism” (Hughes, 1991, p.276). Yet Munch seems forever associated with the fin-de-siècle and the symbolist counter culture that expressed their anxiety of metropolitan culture and the coming new century and horror it would and did eventually bring.  A.S. Byatt recently observed that “like Van Gogh” Munch “wanted to make passionate images of human beings and nature for a secular world  to replace the old religious images” (2012, p.16). This exhibition however, aims to make Munch seem more modern with curators Angela Lampe and Clément Chéroux pointing “out in there catalogue that three quarters of Munch’s output dates from after 1900, most particularly from between 1913-1930” (Byatt, 2012 p.16). 

 

Andy Warhol (1928-1987)
The Scream (after Edvard Munch) 1984

The exhibition “tries to make us see Munch as modern in several ways: his repetition and serial repainting, his interest in photography and film, his use of theatrical lighting” and according the critic Adrian Searle, Munch was “aware of the opportunities and limits afforded by these different media (Searle, 2012). Searle explains that “we always cast the art of the past in ways that always suit us. There is always new research" he reminds us, “new ways seeing” (Searle, 2012).  In the late 20^th Century Munch’s art seems to return in the form of many stylistic borrowings. His angst ridden canvases were the template of much neo-expressionist art and as Searle points out, Warhol “re-worked Munch” (Searle, 2012) with his cool touch, while later artists like Peter Doig quoted him (Doig’s painting always seemed to be the product of the reimagining of an art history, where Munch travelled to Tahiti instead of Gauguin).

Artists’ use of technologies other than brushes and paint is nothing new. Renaissance artists to Vermeer and perhaps most famously Canaletto beyond used the camera obscura: those pioneers of New Media Art.  Arts relationship with the “popular” and mass culture and mass media may have a shorter history, but it is important to take it into consideration when looking at Munch with fresh eyes. It is amazing that Munch is categorized as a Post-Impressionist.  His near contemporary Seurat (Seurat was born in 1859, Munch 1863) and fellow Post-Impressionist “was not shy of taking his motifs from the wild compositions of the most popular advertising artists Jules Cheret” (Hughes. 1996).  That other  Post-Impressionist Van Gogh was 80 years ahead of Warhol, with his love of newsprint: Van Gogh “loved not only Japanese prints, whose colours was highly sophisticated, but also the crude discordant and even brutal colours of mass industrial printing, which could give his work, he said, the effect of a chromolithograph from a cheap shop” (Hughes. 1996). And what of Bonnard, who produced posters advertising French Champagne in the 1890s and of course there was Toulouse Lautrec whose depictions of Parisian nightclub life not only portrayed people as if there faces were  masks, but promoted night clubs and cabarets or James Ensor who depicted modern life as a kind demonic carnival. This cultural mix would have had a profound influence on the young Munch. 

Munch’s modernity perhaps should not be questioned; even though his use of photography as Adrian Searle has recognized is far less extensive or as apparent as say, in the work of Degas, Bonnard or Vuillard (2012). Munch’s modernist consciousness may be close to Baudelaire’s description of modern experiences where alienated souls swarm like ants in the city, “City full of dreams/Where ghosts in daylight tug the stroller’s sleeve!”  However, the explorations of alienation and his expressionist credentials have been questioned by critics. Richard Dorment argues “that Munch always had more to do with the controlled sensuality you find in a Post Impressionism or Symbolism”, while “any idea that The Sick Child represents a morbidly expressionist cry of anguish is dispelled by the very existence of the numerous replicas Munch was willing to paint to order or knew he could sell” (Dorment, 2012). Laura Cumming (2012) has suggested that the exhibition’s catalogue “may be in danger of making a postmodernist of him”. Did not the expressionist Kirchner cynically alter the dates of many of his paintings to suggest that he painted them earlier, therefore influencing the price? Artist’s like de Chirico reworked there art, as did Duchamp. What about Dali’s work in the last couple of decades of his life? Well, perhaps  Munch's repetition was the only way of exorcising trauma, but suffering does seem to sell all the same and countercultures are eventually brought to bear under the pressure of markets.

Egon Shiele, Self-Portrait, 1914

Lucas Samaras Photo Transformation c Mid-seventies

The critics do not seem that convinced by Munch’s photography.  Dorment states “that although Munch took photographs and made films these are of little aesthetic importance” and Searle sees their relationship to Munch’s art as “extremely limited”. Perhaps Munch does not have that incredible relationship with film as Edward Hopper whose imagery, influenced by theatre design and film then goes on to inform the landscape of a Hitchcock and infuse Wim Wender's vision of America in films like Hammett. Munch does adopt in his photographs theatrical poses so perhaps his photography is part of that traditional of self-portraiture associated with expressionists concern of the self.  One thinks of Egon Shiela’s self-portraits from 1914 with there ridiculous level of vanity. Perhaps they, like Munch’s work are a kind proto-performance art, a forerunner of the art that emerged in the 60s and came to dominate the nineteen seventies art scene. We may live in the age of the narcissistic self where we begin with Expressionism and then the photography of Lucas Samera or Anulf Reiner and end here in the 21^st Century with Facebook, iphoto, iphone and mobile media that is producing endless examples of self-inspection, on the web, in spaces not too dissimilar from this one. The clumsy casualness and unfocused nature of some of Munch’s photography with its almost web-cam like aesthetic, shares something with so many of the artefacts produced in this age of the amateur. 

The cover shows a detail of Munch's The Sick Child

 The cover shows a detail from a lithogragh by Edvard Munch, The Death Chamber (1896).

Munch's connection with a broader modernism may be found in his involvement other media. Munch had ventured into stage design and “in 1906 he worked in Berlin with the great theatre director Max Reinhardt”, where he designed sets for Ibsen’s Ghost’s and Hedda Gabler (Byatt, AS, 2012 p.17). One may wonder how much he influenced Expressionist theatre (he may have found himself competing with Edward Gordon Craig). Munch is now irrevocably linked to both Strindberg and Ibsen, not least because of Penguin Classics designer, Germano Facetti, who before Warhol copied Munch and used his pictures for the covers of Ibsen’s Ghosts and Other Plays and Strinberg’s Three Plays in the nineteen sixties.

Why a Munch exhibition now? Well there is  the rise of 'Nordic noir' which, like Munch's art, explores Scandinavia's dark soul. One thinks imediately of the TV series, The Killing, which has proved immensely poular in the UK, so may explain why London has hosted these paintings.

Sources:

Byatt, AS, (2012), "The mean  reds" The Guardian, Review, 23 June, 2012 pp. 16-17.

Cumming, Laura,  (2012), "Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye- review", The Observer, Sunday 1 July, 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jul/01/edvard-munch-modern-eye-review

Dorment Richard, (2012), "Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, Tate Modern, review", The Telegraph  Monday 25 June 2012

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9354262/Edvard-Munch-The-Modern-Eye-Tate-Modern-review.html

Hughes, Robert (1991) Shock of the New, London: Thames and Hudson

Hughes, Robert (1996) The Myths of High and Low, International Society of the Performing Arts, December 15, 1996.

Searle, Adrian, (2012), "Edvard Munch: a head for horror", The Guardian Monday 25 June 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2012/jun/25/edvard-munch-tate-retrospective

Cezanne's Studio

Above is a photograph of Cézanne's studio in Aix-en-Provence is described by Robert Hughes as "one of the sacred places of the modern mind, a reliquary" (Hughes, R. 1991 p.124).

In 1906, just before he died Cézanne wrote a letter to his son:

"I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before nature . . .
Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle offers
subject for study for the most powerful interest for months without changing place, by turning now
more to the right, now more to the left" (Rewald, 1995, p. 327).

On the 21st August 1906 he wrote a letter to Emile Bernard:

"Now, being  old, nearly 70 years, the sensations of colour, which give the light, are for me the reason for the abstractions which do not allow me to cover my canvas entirely nor to pursue the delimitation of the objects where their points of contact are fine and delicate; from which it results that my image or picture is incomplete"  (Harrison and Wood, 2001 p.39)

Sources:

Harrison, C., and Wood, P., Art in Theory 1900-1990 Oxford: Blackwells.

Hughes, R., The Shock of the New London: Thames and Hudson

Rewald, John (ed. 1995), Paul Cézanne, Letters New York: Da Capo Press.

Utopia and Designed Futures

There seems to be a number of themes emerging from the blog. Recently I have been viewing Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over by Machine of Loving Grace with fascination and I have already been struck by the similarities between the beliefs of techno-evangelists and those of the high priests of modernism. I discussed this issue in a blog entry titled “The ‘Architecture’ of the Web: Digital Utopias and Dystopias”


The first episode of Curtis’s documentary begins with the Ayn Rand and her philosophy of objectivism while the second episode deals with partially the ideas of the architect Buckminster-Fuller.
Modernist design and designers influenced by the ideas the Constructivists, the Futurists, the Bauhaus and De Stijl, thought they could change society with their creations. Architecture was the main expression of these claims. However, whole areas of our culture have been altered by the modernist belief that technology could produce a better and less divided society. Designers with their declaration that ‘form follows function’ have endeavoured to make designs seem progressive, functional and rational and less ornate, in direct opposition to the Arts and Crafts Movement and the luxury style of Art Nouveau. Architectural drawings have influenced science fiction illustration and writing, while buildings have been important backdrops to films and television programmes and are alluded to in graphic design (one thinks of Peter York's name for designers: "gridniks"). The novel Fountainhead (1943) by Ayn Rand, later made into a film (dir. King Vidor 1949), explores the idea of the image of the designer as a priest, social thinker and lifestyle guru. It is interesting to note that Rand’s protagonist was said to be based on the ‘image’ of Frank Lloyd Wright. Today, the more representational computer games include architectural renderings and web and multi-media design speaks in architectural metaphors. The modernist ideas in typography and the presentation of information in grid forms are reminiscent of the International Typographical Style and usability heuristics in web design. Post World War Two and certainly after 1960, designers opposed to what they saw as the minimalism and sterility of modern designs have been referred to as post-modern. Tom Wolfe in his book From Bauhaus to our House (1981) criticises Le Corbusier and Gropius and Utopia and the whole concept of architect as design guru.






Further reading and Sources:


Bock, Manfred et al. De Stijl: 1917-1931: visions of utopia Oxford: Phaidon, 1982
Fer, B et al. Realism, rationalism, surrealism: art between the wars Yale University Press in association with Open University, 1993
Lamster, Mark Architecture and film New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000
Loos, Adolf Spoken into the void: collected essays, 1897-1900 Cambridge, Mass.: Published for the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, Ill. and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, New York, N.Y, MIT Press, 1982
Mansbach, Steven A. Visions of totality: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Theo van Doesburg, and El Lissitzky UMI Research Press, 1980
Margolin, Victor The struggle for utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, 1917-1946 London: University of Chicago Press, 1997
Moore, Thomas Utopia London: Dent, 1985
Overy, Paul De Stijl London: Thames and Hudson, c1991
Ward, Glenn Paul Postmodernism London: Teach Yourself, 1997

Shock of the New 1: Mechanical Paradise

The television series “Shock of the New” was first broadcast in 1980. The above episode was last broadcast in on Sat, 27 September 2008, at 20:00.

The series explores the development of modern art from 1880 to the present or at least to 1980 with the series and the first addition of the book based on the series. The first episode “Mechanical Paradise” (see above) shows how the development of technology transformed art and culture between the years 1880 and 1914. 

The key word was modernity and its emblem was the Eiffel Tower: its creator an engineer and not an architect.  This emblem signalled the end of one kind of history and the birth of another as the 19th moved into the 20th Century.

Hughes discusses Paul Cezanne and his works curious if sometimes contradictory relationship to Cubism. Hughes explores Cubism and its “inventors” Pablo Picasso and George Braque. Cubism according to Hughes was the first time artists confronted these cultural changes, shifts in contemporary philosophy and science and the birth of mass media. The transforming urban experience was explored by artists as diverse as Delaunay, Juan Gris and Leger and the poet Apollinaire.

The Marinetti and the Futurists seized upon the transforming poetry of the machine and speed, while the work of Picabia and Duchamp seem to suggest something less romantic about technology.
   
This episode concludes with the outbreak of World War One and the end of the hopes and dreams of the early machine age.
 
Credits
Presenter: Robert Hughes
Producer: Lorna Pegram
 
BBC Time-Life television series.

Cyberculture to E-Culture (sounds so late eighties early 90s)? Erm... Towards E-topia? Part 2

The WWW over the years seems to shift from being a new frontier, a wild west as one writer put it, to something that resembles a property developer’s paradise. Is Tim Berners-Lee’s utopian vision and rather altruistic outlook being challenged by the giant software companies, international corporations and governments eager to control the flow of information? Certainly over the years, governments have attempted curtail “free-speech” on the web. In a previous post I said that Tony Benn championed the use of Internet and web technologies. I saw an interview where he discussed other means of communication, which were ‘nationalised’ by a government: during the reformation, Henry VIII placed a priest in every pulpit to say exactly what the king wanted his people to hear and during the reign of Charles II the postal service was established. The web, he argued was for the people and so counters the official language of institutions and governmental agencies. The web’s pluralistic and multi-vocal nature makes this a radical communication system, that ‘undermines the borders of national identity’, central authority and erodes ‘the old distinctions between public and private self’ (Ward, 1997, 2003 pp. 124-5). Its ability to transcend boundaries has led to it to be described as the first postmodern medium.

In the mid to late nineties we saw the struggle between Netscape and Microsoft for control of the Web. Controlling the means of communication controls the information that flows through it. Companies like Reuters have always appreciated the importance of technology in the distribution of information. Microsoft attempted to create an alternative web with MSN (Microsoft Network). This essentially failed. The creation of Explorer, Microsoft’s browser, challenged the dominance of Netscape. This led to disagreements over technical protocols and certainly Microsoft’s early actions have been interpreted as an attempt to curtail the freedom of the user and the eclectic and anarchic nature of the web, with Microsoft pushing it’s own ideas about protocols that were/are different from everyone else’s. These technical difficulties have been largely resolved through the dedication of people like Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web Consortium (www.w3.org). Microsoft’s business practices have been questioned and it’s monopoly of the operating system and web browser market that has in the words of some commentators led to a monoculture, has been attacked in court. This did not lead to a break up of the company, but recently Mozilla Firefox has challenged Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market.


New Scientist: “Microsoft monoculture allows virus spread” 25 September 2003: www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn4203

Cyberculture to E-Culture (sounds so late eighties early 90s)? Erm... Towards E-topia? Part 1

At the moment I sense a creeping technological determinism in my writing. From John Berger’s discussion of television, film, photography and oil painting to the more recent programmes on the virtual revolution, we see the ways in which technology seems to shape our perception of the world around us and shapes ‘our’ culture and helps us re-present reality. Like Vertov’s ‘mechanical eye’, which was ‘free… for today and forever from human immobility’ (Berger, 1972 p.12) our ‘eyes’ can travel immense distances through networks of the World Wide Web and the Internet. We can now visit the Grand Canyon on our computer screens via Google Earth.
There is another invention that radically changed European culture and politics, an ‘ancestor’ of the WWW: the European technology of printing and moveable type, in the 15th Century by Johannes Gutenberg. This technology was a key development in the Renaissance and became a major factor in the Reformation. To those privileged to read (remember most Europeans of the fifteenth century were illiterate), all world knowledge in the west resided in two sets of texts: The Bible and the works of Aristotle. Today, we throw the equivalent amount of information into the recycling bin after we have finished with our Sunday newspaper. How many words exist on the WWW? It is also important to note that in the 15th Century ‘our’ main source of information came from village gossip, art and the pulpit.

Tim Berners-Lee, the ‘inventor’ of the web and the HTML code (of course he had a little help from Ted Nelson who devised hypertext), has on a number of occasions explained his role as inventor and as an observer and commentator of its use and rapid expansion. The Internet was initially invented the 1960s, a product of the military-industrial complex to allow scientists and the military to share information and maintain communications in the event of a nuclear attack. Post cold war, from being a tool of largely governmental agencies the Internet quickly became a global network.

The idea of a global network of easily accessible information is a product of liberal capitalism and a democratic society. These inventions have created a virtual soapbox, where theoretically everyone has the right to publish: a right to free speech. Tony Benn the ex-labour MP, sees the Internet/WWW as something that is beyond the control of governments. However, since many sites are unedited there is the threat of misinformation and for the potential circulation of dangerous ideas.

Cyberhistories: Cyberspace, Cyber Art and Cyberculture

If we look at the histories of digital media and the computer, we see the development begins somewhere during WWII, with Weiner and Vanevar Bush in America: the beginnings of the military industrial complex and in Britain with Alan Turing (although the computers development can be said to be much earlier).

Postwar we see digital pioneers from John and James Whitney to Benoit Mandelbrot. Computers can be seen as a creative and liberating force, a seductive and progressive idea reinforced by advertising campaigns that promote software such as Photoshop and hardware like the Apple Mac computer. Look at the way Apple promoted the Mackintosh computer. Generally, we see a shift from computers being viewed as part of a culture of calculation (as parodied by Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson), seen in the examples of the machines designed by Charles Babbage or seen in Bletchley Park in WWII, and stereotypically PCs and Unix and command line environments, subject to hierarchy and centralised control (a tendency of Modernism) to one that includes the Internet and the WWW and emphasises a culture of simulation that is decentralised and fragmented (a tendency of Post-Modernism). The more recent digital and interactive design of John Maybury, Jenny Boulter and William Latham will bare witness to this ‘liberation’, as they themselves reveal the blurring distinctions between design practitioners and their practices and computer science. These are just of few of the professionals who have shaped the use of this fairly new medium, influenced art and designers and experimented and stretched the creative potential of these technologies.

Ad Reinhardt

"An avant-garde in art advances art-as-art or it isn't avant-garde" (Ad Reinhardt).

Ad Reinhardt’s aims as a maker of images seems rather removed from my attachment to what could be called the romantic or spiritual in visual culture.




Reinhardt’s art “moved from geometrical abstraction through a controlled and markedly impersonal form of Abstract Expressionism into a uniquely concentrated and super elegant geometrical abstraction. From 1960 until his death in 1967 he painted nothing but square canvases of one size in which two barely distinguishable coats of black present a cruciform trisection of the surface” (Lynton, N., 2003, p.244).

Abstract Painting No. 5 1962

In 1960 Reinhardt explains his aims as a painter: "Nowhere in world art has it been clearer than in Asia that anything irrational, momentary, spontaneous, unconscious, primitive, expressionist, accidental or informal, cannot be called serious art. Only blankness, complete awareness, disinterestedness; the ‘artist as artist’ only, of one and rational mind, ‘vacant and spiritual’, empty and marvellous; in symmetries and regularities only; the changeless ‘human content’, the timeless ‘supreme principle’, the ageless ‘universal formula for art, nothing else" (Lynton, N., 2003 p.244).




Ad Reinhardt in his essay “Art as Art” argued against art-as-expression or art-as-apocalypse. “Art”, he argued “needs no justification with ‘realism’ or ‘naturalism,’ ‘regionalism’ or ‘nationalism,’ individualism’ or ‘socialism,’ or any other ideas” (Reinhardt, A., 1992 p.806). “The one standard in art”, he suggests “is oneness and fineness, rightness and purity, abstractness and evanescence. The one thing to say about art is its breathlessness, lifelessness, deathlessness, contentlessness, formlessness, spacelessness and timelessness. This is always the end of art” (Reinhardt, A., 1992 p.806).


Sources:

Harrison, C. and Wood, P., (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwells.

Lynton, N., (2003) The Story of Modern Art, London and New York: Phaidon

Reinhardt, Ad (1962) "Art as Art" in Harrison, C. and Wood, P., (1992) Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Oxford: Blackwells, pp.806-809.

The ‘Architecture’ of the Web: Digital Utopias and Dystopias

"It’s a strange day
No colours or shapes
No sound in my head
I forget who I am
When I’m with you
There’s no reason
There’s no sense
I’m not supposed to feel
I forget who I am
I forget
Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia
My dog needs new ears
Make his eyes see forever
Make him live like me
Again and again
I’m wired to the world
That’s how I know everything
I’m super brain
That’s how they made me"

Utopia by Goldfrapp.


Ideas pertaining to the ‘modern movement’ in architecture can be used to inform many of the debates and ideas that now surround the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 and indeed Media Studies 2.0.

"1984" Apple Macintosh Advertisement directed by Ridley Scott

There is a sense of post-modern euphoria that we have broken free from the past and that old modernist theories are as redundant as their hierarchies of class, culture and taste, to name but three; we have reached some kind of e-topia. These utopian concepts partly came out of the sixties counter culture that reacted against modernism’s perceived authoritarianism- one thinks of Apple, a product of Californian sunshine and LSD, offering us an alternative world, a technological vision with a Byrdsian soundtrack, an alternative to the grey corporatism of the monolithic and historically dubious IBM. In eschewing modernist theories along with all the modernist inequities, are we in danger of throwing the theoretical baby out with the modernist bathwater?

In fact, the optimism surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web as a communications tool has modernist utopian overtones, because modernism itself was, to many modernists, also a utopia. The web can be seen as a social condenser. The social condenser is a Soviet Constructivist theory about architectural space and how it has the ability to influence behaviour. Does not the ‘architecture’ of the WWW, a public space, break down perceived hierarchies and create an environment that allows and encourages communities to interact? Looked at this way, the computer becomes the liberation machine in a similar vein to modernism’s architectural ‘machines for living’ that were meant to somehow improve us.

There are also ideas pertaining to the pre-psychedelia, 1950s modernism of the International Typographical Style and its demand for clarity in design that are useful to us when trying to articulate the utopian nature of the Web. In web design Usability Heuristics demands similar things from its designers. The doctrine of usability suggests that with usability comes sociability.

With post-modern utopian notions of connectivity and the transcendence of national, institutional and political boundaries, are we being starry eyed in our optimism, or should we be harking back to the days of clean lines and Soviet-style functionality? The belief that new media benefit society through their attack on perceived hierarchies, and that the web is a great leveller, can be countered by the equally valid argument that the Web is undermining intellectual authority, generating failed spaces that are hostile, that threaten individual and collective security and help to circulate false information and dangerous ideas.

Is the computer best understood, then, with reference to modernist or post-modernist ideas of utopia's and dystopia's?

Modernism, Modernity and Modernité: Omissions and Corrections.

Modernity is a word that is often used as an overarching periodizing term to denote a historical era. In my first comments regarding this I do make this clear, however I stated that we began with 18th Century Enlightenment, something that is true, but ignores some aspects of modernity’s development that starts in earlier centuries.  I did not emphasis that Modernity refers to a post-traditional, post-medieval historical period. So in a way we may begin somewhere in the Renaissance with the marked by the move from feudalism (or agrarianism) towards capitalism in say 14^th Century Florence or even earlier. In England we saw the power of the King challenged by parliament leading to the English Civil War. At this point around 1650 we witness the development of the Public Sphere and opening of the first coffee house in Oxford.  It is perhaps important to note that Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations and Denis Diderot is said to have written parts of the Encyclopédie in a coffee house. The coffee house becomes the great social condenser of 18^th Century France, helping to break down class barriers. This is discussed in Adam Hart Davis’ Eureka Years http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/b00cdvk0. Modernity also means a shift towards industrialization, secularization, rationalization and the nation-state. So we see an overarching period from the Renaissance to Enlightenment or Age of Reason, to the Age of Revolutions (American, Industrial, French, 1848, Russian) concluding Post WWII, especially after 1968.

Modernité is concerned with a distinctly modern sense of dislocation and ambiguity and locates it in the more general experience of the aestheticization of everyday life, as exemplified in the ephemeral and transitory qualities of an urban culture shaped by the imperatives of fashion, consumerism, and constant innovation. Here one may consider Baudelaire, Manet or Toulouse Lautrec.

Modernism describes the art, culture, design and style of a historical period: the Modern Age or Modernity. The term is used by Charles Baudelaire in the mid-nineteenth century to designate a new field of action for the artist. For Baudelaire it describes the culture of the “modern world” or bourgeois industrial society. It is about what is new in one’s own culture and implied an obligation to be of one’s own time. The exact character of this age, as well as its precise dates (although generally speaking the mid -19th Century is often cited as a start date), are described in very different ways by critics and historians (see Richard Kostelanetz and Robert Hughes amongst many others). I think it is fair to say that modernism can vary from country to country and varies from practice to practice Modernist theatre, film, art, photography; design may begin at very different times. Anyway, modernism is often associated with faith in: progress, optimism, rationalism and clarity of communication in some contexts.  With the early days of modernism there was the utopian belief that mechanization and technology if properly channelled could produce a less divided society, perhaps by the seventies and eighties this started to look absurd. The end of modernism corresponds with the “collapse” of modernity: the architecture historian Charles Jenks gives us the year 1972 and even the exact minute of the collapse (I mean this literally) of modernism and the modern movement with the destruction of Pruitt–Igoe the housing complex designed by Minoru Yamasaki. I think that it was Robert Hughes in The New Shock of the New that refers to 9/11 as modernisms final moments.  The World Trade Centre was also designed by Minoru Yamasaki.

Modernism and Modernity

Media Technologies and Public Spheres: 2

The second session Wednesday 7 October , 2009: 'The Media and Modernity: Mediation, Technology, Change'.

Here are some of my thoughts on Modernism and Modernity:

The adjective modern refers to the contemporaneous. So in terms of art, all art is modern to those who make it, whether they are the inhabitants of Renaissance Florence or present day Lincoln. Specifically the term Modern refers to a historical period from the mid 19th century to the nineteen seventies. The exact end date for modernism is up for debate, but we could argue the the 1970s represented the beginning of the end.

Modernism is a critical approach that stresses innovation over all criteria. It is characterised by a radical attitude toward both the past and present. Historically we begin in the 18th Century and the Enlightenment and then at a period that has often been called the Age of Revolution (American, French and Industrial) and then in 1848 the year of the Chartists and the revolutions that swept Europe changing peoples attitude to contemporary life. Crucial to the development of modernism was the break down of traditional of financial power-the church, the state, and the aristocratic elite. This meant that artists were more independent and so free to determine the content of their art, refusing to depict paintings with mythological, religious and historical themes (often referred to as Academic Art). Modernism was widely, but not exclusively associated with life in an industrialised society and was often distinguished by its celebration of technology and science (challenged by many modern artists after 1914). Modern Art arose as part of Western society’s attempt to come to terms with the urban, industrial and secular society that emerged from the 19th century. Modern design emerged as a reaction against the declining standards of craftsmanship and to the Art Nouveau movement from the 1880s onwards. Many practitioners recognized the need for new approaches that would enable the mass production of well-made artefacts for mass consumption. It was believed that mechanization and technology, if properly channelled, could change society for the better. Progress seems to be a key word here when in art we see one style succeed another in quick succession. In the late 19th Century and early Twentieth Century we see the content of art shift from realism and naturalism to spirituality, the celebration of technology, the evocation of primitivism and the emptying of art of all identifiable forms. So Modernism cannot be seen as just one movement.